Or at least not entirely useless

Tag: Configuration Manager (page 1 of 2)

Update: After doing a full-court press on this we were able to get Microsoft to address this officially. My thanks to Mary Jo Foley and Donna Ryan for help make that happen. Updating Windows 10, version 1903 using Configuration Manager or WSUS Apparently Microsoft isn’t ready to talk about this yet so I guess I […]

5/14/2019 Update: They did it AGAIN! In May 2019 the Cumulative Updates for Win 10 1607 (LTSC), Win 10 1803, Server 2016, and Server 2019 all require the Servicing Stack Updates released in the same month. 1/9/19 Update: The most recently released SSU (KB4486458) was given a distinctive title (2019-01 Servicing Stack Update for Windows […]

As a rule, you shouldn’t need to do this but there is currently a specific use case where you will. The impact of getting it wrong is not pretty so learn from my mistakes. Then vote on UserVoice to make the whole thing just go away.

Historically it’s been considered taboo to touch WSUS when part of a Configuration Manager environment. Those times have now past and if you’re not actively maintaining WSUS on a regular basis it’s more than likely failing causing scan failures.

For reasons you may not want to share at Configuration Manager administrator parties you may find yourself managing clients that are not domain joined. Often administrators assume Configuration Manager can’t do that or is severely limited. Read on for all the gory details.

For well over a decade there’s been a social contract of sorts with Microsoft. Security patches are released on the second Tuesday of the month at 10 AM Pacific Time. They release and we start our patching processes. Well … what if they didn’t?

While some maintenance tasks have been long understood others have gained importance and understanding more recently. Either way, all of them should be fully automated as part of your patching process. I’ve created and released a script that does exactly that for every software update maintenance task that I can think of and does it in an extensible way that any organization should be able to utlize.

I tried … and failed … to implement Server Group Patching to automate patching our Exchange clusters. That doesn’t mean I didn’t learn a few useful things about how the feature works and how to troubleshoot it.